A NATION CHALLENGED: TOURISM

A NATION CHALLENGED: TOURISM; Liberty Island Will Reopen, But With Statue Cordoned Off

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

Published: December 18, 2001

WASHINGTON, Dec. 17—
Starting Thursday, huddled masses will once again be allowed to visit Ellis Island and Liberty Island, though Lady Liberty herself will remain off limits, a lingering victim of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

The National Park Service, which oversees the landmark, has strengthened security for both islands. But officials said the Statue of Liberty itself would remain off limits at least until next year, though visitors will be free to walk around it.

Even with the reopening of the islands, tourists will face new restrictions. Before Sept. 11, visitors were screened before going into the statue; now they will be screened before boarding the ferries from New York and New Jersey.

They will go through magnetometers and will no longer be allowed to take bags larger than handbags or camera packs. And for now there will be no access to the statue at all, including to the observation deck at its pedestal, from which tourists liked to view the Manhattan skyline.

Ferries to Ellis and Liberty Islands were halted Sept. 11 after planes smashed into the nearby World Trade Center. Gale Norton, the secretary of the interior, and officials from New York and New Jersey are to take the first ferries Thursday morning and greet visitors on the 9 a.m. rides.

The reopening of Ellis and Liberty Islands follows the Interior Department's reopening last week of tours inside Hoover Dam, near Las Vegas. The revival of tourism at both landmarks, the park service's major installations that were secured after the attacks, is intended to signal a return to normalcy, officials said, even though the nation has been put on heightened alert three times by Tom Ridge, the director of Homeland Security, and never taken off.

As Ms. Norton said Dec. 12 from the observation deck of Hoover Dam, and is expected to say Thursday at Ellis Island, ''This will demonstrate to the world and to the American public that even though atrocities such as those of Sept. 11 can affect us, they cannot close us down.''

Brian Feeney, a spokesman for the park service, said: ''We still have some security issues to deal with. Rather than continue to keep the statue closed, we decided that a phased reopening made more sense.

''People want to go back and see the statue and they want to make that connection again with New York. We wanted to reopen it by the holiday.''

About four million tourists visit Ellis Island and Liberty Island every year. An Interior Department spokesman said that of those, only 40 percent actually went into the statue and climbed the 354 steps up into her crown.

The most popular activities are going to the museum on Ellis Island, where people can research their family histories, and taking in the skyline of Lower Manhattan, now bereft of its famous twin towers.

Mr. Feeney said tourists often took luggage with them because they were stopping at Ellis Island after checking out of a hotel. Now, he said, they will not be allowed to take bags of any real size on the ferry, and there are no lockers or other places for storage at the ferry docks. (Ferry schedules and information should soon be available at statueoflibertyferry.com.)

At Hoover Dam, about 3,000 people visited each day before Sept. 11. A week after, the visitor's center reopened, receiving about 1,300 people a day, but no tours were conducted. On Nov. 19, the Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees the dam, started offering ''top of the dam'' tours, which included lectures by guides, and on Wednesday reinstituted its tours of the power plant below.

But what was a 25-minute tour of the dam, completed in 1935 and considered a feat of civil engineering, now takes 10 minutes. And the bureau has discontinued its more extensive, $25 ''hard-hat'' tours into the bowels of the plant.

''We've taken some steps to secure these areas so that people cannot access the dam,'' said Bob Walsh, a spokesman for the bureau.

The dam's visitor center installed magnetometers last spring because, like other federal facilities, it was ordered to upgrade its security after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.